Anchors and Foundations: Convening Elites in Urban Governance

The City of Baltimore, Maryland evidences Peck’s (2012) contention that ‘austerity urbanism’ is normal and local in the US. What are the implications for how the city is governed? Within Baltimore’s governing regime, different coalitions can be discerned across urban spaces and policy fields (Blanco, 2015). Drawing from ongoing research in the city in the policy realms of neighbourhood revitalisation/ community development, this paper identifies the city’s key governance actors as its ‘ed and med’ anchor institutions and philanthropic foundations, along with city and to a lesser extent state government and its agencies. In contrast to the European state-led structures established at the high point of the ‘collaborative moment’, in Baltimore anchors and foundations take the lead, the latter performing what they describe as a ‘convening’ role. The city’s own legacies and influences have resulted in its own ‘collaborative moment’, in which the crisis point of riots in the city in 2015 is perceived as a critical juncture. The changes emerging allude to the paradigm shift posited by Imbroscio (2013, 2015) to more localist and community approaches (to economic development). Research findings raise questions about the contestability of philanthropic foundations as members of ‘civil society’; and the mutability of their role as a defence against the state in the Tocquevillian tradition, or as part of the ‘integral state’.